A court order that could, in what may be considered a worst-case scenario, lead to the early release of thousands of state prison inmates prompted outrage from Southern California police leaders, as well as liberal and conservative politicians who decried the ruling as a threat to public safety.

Gov. Jerry Brown immediately responded to Thursday's ruling by declaring he will seek a stay of what he described as an "unprecedented" order calling for the release of nearly 10,000 inmates by year's end.

The judges who issued the ruling demanded that California reduce its prison population by 9,400 inmates. Although it was not necessarily certain that, if the ruling is upheld, all of those inmates would be freed instead of confined in alternative facilities, the possibility remains that the order may result in thousands of inmates being released into communities where police services have been cut due to local government's budget struggles since the Great Recession.

"This puts us in a very tough position," Long Beach Police Chief Jim McDonnell said.

The Long Beach Police Department recently hired 50 officers, McDonnell said, which would put its total staffing of sworn men and women to just over 800 officers.

The Long Beach department had more than 1,000 officers about three years ago.

"When the economy is as tough as it is, and everybody's belt-tightening, in the Police Department, the most expensive resource we have is personnel," McDonnell said.

A UC Berkeley study published in April observed that budgeting decisions carried out from 2009 through 2011 in 25 California cities including Los Angeles, Long Beach, Glendale, Fontana and San Bernardino resulted in total police staffing in those cities shrinking from about 23,300 officers to about 22,100 officers. Those cuts did not exactly correlate to crime increases, and crime fell in many jurisdictions during the study period.

But researchers also warned that crime appeared to be rising in 15 of the cities under study at the start of 2012, and that California's existing attempt to relieve prison overcrowding, known as "realignment," places local agencies under greater strain.

Realignment went into effect in October 2011, following a ruling earlier that year that health conditions within California's overcrowded prisons constituted cruel and unusual punishment. Corrections and probation officials tend to bristle when critics say realignment has burdened the state with an "early release" of criminals, rather than describing the policy as a means to shift the job of housing and supervising relatively low-risk offenders from the state to counties.Yet many law enforcement officials have blamed realignment for rising crime.

Torrance police, for example, say realignment explains a spike in burglaries this year. So far, the city has 88 residential burglaries compared to 73 at the same point last year and 78 two years ago.

Sgt. Robert Watt said that before the prison overcrowding relief program began, burglars received one day of credit for every three days served of their sentences. Since realignment, burglars receive a day of credit for every two days served.

Torrance police said that more than 90 percent of residential burglaries are committed by gang members because they know that they will receive short sentences under realignment.

"The revolving door in the jail system has become a turnstile," Torrance Police Chief John Neu said.

When Sacramento politicians enacted realignment, they also allocated funding for the probation and police departments required to be responsible for the policy. Proposition 30, the temporary tax increase passed by voters last year, secured the dollars for that plan.

Police chiefs in Fontana and Redlands said Thursday, however, that departments are not receiving enough financial support to take on the burdens that an actual release of thousands of prisoners may entail.

Police departments up and down the state share $24 million in realignment funding, compared with some $800 million for the county governments that are not only charged with maintaining sheriff's patrols, but also jailing and supervising a greater number of criminals than before realignment, Fontana Police Chief Rodney Jones said.

Fontana's share of the funding is $265,000, Jones said. Fontana's finances are stable enough for the city council to have approved the hiring of 10 new officers in its new budget, but other cities don't have that ability.

"I think the money that we're getting from the state comes nowhere near the demands and challenges that we're facing," Jones said.

In Redlands' case, realignment has enabled the Police Department to hire a single new officer, Chief Mark Garcia said. The department has partnered that officer with a San Bernardino County probation officer to monitor offenders who are under local supervision under realignment law.

Garcia also said he views realignment as a source of rising crime in the city. Redlands police report a near 18 percent rise in major crime from 2011 though 2012, including a 38.5 percent rise in aggravated assaults and a 30.3 percent rise in auto thefts.

Probation officials in Los Angeles and San Bernardino counties said it's not yet certain whether any offenders who would be subject to early release will be monitored by probation officers or state parole agents. Although the court order gave state officials the option of releasing relatively low-risk offenders first, any inmates whose terms are reduced as a result of the judges' order may have committed offenses serious enough to fall under parole's watch.

But county officials are bracing for more work, and San Bernardino County Probation spokesman Chris Condon said he is sure the department will be able to handle it.

"We have to wait and see," Condon said. "I would imagine that probably a large number of them are PRCS offenders that would come to us."

The term PRCS refers to Post-Release Community Supervision, the policy in which relatively low-risk offenders are monitored by county probation officers.

Los Angeles County assistant probation chief Margarita Perez said officials in her department are working on assumptions that if the judges' order stands, most of the inmates who are to be removed from prison will be shunted to jails or other facilities instead of being put on the streets.

Even so, those assumptions include the prediction that nearly 4,200 offenders will be released, she said. Of that number, roughly 1,200 would return to Los Angeles County.

Whereas Assembly Republicans and Senate President Pro Tem Darrell Steinberg both produced statements in opposition to the order, not all greeted the judges' decision with alarm, as prisoners rights advocates said Thursday's ruling signaled a needed change in California's approach to law enforcement.

"The state continues to lock up far to many people for far too long and that is really not necessary to keep the streets safe," said Will Matthews, spokesman for ACLU, California. "Realignment was a step in the right direction, but it was not the answer."

Matthews said the state's three-strike law, which voters overturned in 2012, and the influence of the law enforcement lobby has long been an obstacle to prison reform.

Staff writer Larry Altman and The Associated Press contributed to this report.